9 ms·
CNN – 1996 Year in Review
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoLook at how fast it is! DOM content loaded after just 100ms, whole thing done in 400.
- 0xcafecafe 9y agoIt is interesting how pages like these are like a time capsule. For instance, I was just watching the movie Philadelphia yesterday and how many of the misconceptions/prejudices around AIDS were prevalent then. And here, in this link, there is news about some advances made there.
- tardo99 9y agoMy recollection is the prejudices around AIDS had diminished dramatically by the time Philadelphia came out. But, the movie is (I think) depicting a past event when things would have been different. Also, movies often blow things a bit out of proportion. In the early-to-mid 80s, though, it would have been spot on.
- grep4master 9y agoMuch better load times than the current one.
- probst 9y agoI was just going to comment the same!
- zoul 9y agoIt’s around 64 KB, which means around 10 seconds load time on a modem, if I remember correctly. That’s very comparable to the current state of affairs.
- masswerk 9y agoUsual rational at that time was to not go beyond 40K, if possible. So 64K was rather "fat".
- savanaly 9y agoBecause they wrote it in an era when internet connections were slow. They have not necessarily moved along the time-to-load-vs-page-size tradeoff curve so much as the curve itself has shifted due to improved connections and computation speeds. It's like looking at a newspaper from a century ago and remarking "how much cheaper it was back then!" Technically you're right, but the change in nominal price is not a useful economic indicator.
- zhte415 9y agoA newspaper a century ago is an excellent analogy. Then, the front page was filled with advertising. The content was almost entirely sponsored, or in times of war or national fraction, overwhelmingly towing the official line. Newspapers a century ago are exactly the same as popular web today. It's like looking at an article from a news site today, and being presented with a splash-screen 5-second advert, or not being sure who sponsored the content you're reading. 100 year old press is identical to web-news today.
- pp19dd 9y agoHuh. Actually, it looks like they cleaned up a bit recently. As of a few weeks ago, there were far more skeletons in place (as literally scoured from robots.txt). Snapshot from their antiquated ad spaces listing- https://pp19dd.com/2013/02/attack-of-test3-from-outer-space/#specimen_1 https://pp19dd.com/2013/02/attack-of-test3-from-outer-space/...
- matt4077 9y agoTo nitpick on your example No 3: The question is "what amount of money would make the injured party whole again", to which the answer was "One million". To that one million, another million was added in punitive damages, summing to the total of two million. Punitive damages are added to "regular" damages. The idea is that, for example, you may have only lost $30 when your bank fudged the numbers in their favour. But only awarding you $30 would be too low to discourage such behaviour by the bank, and it would also be too low to make it worth your time and money to sue.
- pp19dd 9y agoThat was my point exactly- annotations that require annotations. Think of it from the reader's perspective: they see $2 million highlighted in an article, they mouseover, click, tap or otherwise interact with it. But then a bubble comes up and gives them a different number that can't possibly be immediately interpreted without further reading and maybe analysis. It's confusing to be presented by conflicting information at a glance. Annotations are meant to take a reader to primary evidence or otherwise supplement an understanding. However, primary evidence isn't always so precisely straight-forward to be able to do that sensibly- that was my point.
- jlgaddis 9y agoHeh, I recently came across a "guestbook" [0] that I set up ~20 years ago. I doubt that new posts work but it's still there all these years later. HTML was so much simpler back then. [0]: http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html
- tzahola 9y agoIt definitely needs some <marquee>
- wallace_f 9y ago>Hello from Croatia! Reminds me of a feeling that the web had back then. Full of wonder, opportunity; it felt safe, friendly, cozy. I wish I could explain it better. Kind of like a party with trusted friends with shared interests and discovery. Now it feels like a lot of work and little wonder. It feels unsafe, hostile and you know you are being watched, but not for your protection.
- sverige 9y agoOTOH,the oldest guestbook entry is spam advertising the signer's web page lol. That part was there from the beginning.
- wallace_f 9y agoYea, and not just the greasy salesmanship and profiteering, but the psychopaths and bullies were there as well. It was still a lot different, and I liked the fact it was filled with a lot more nerds, relatively speaking.
- beamatronic 9y agoWhen getting online required more effort, it filtered out a lot of people who weren't serious. I often wonder what is the equivalent to a BBS today.
- rlu 9y ago
- austincheney 9y agoContrast the load times between those 1996 pages from the current site. Keep in mind there is probably no advertising spyware in the 96 site and it may account for most of the HTTP requests on the current site.
- drewg123 9y agoAnd there are also no annoying autoplay videos. That has to help load times too. I wish companies would understand that if I'm reading something on the web, I want to read it, not be distracted by a video that contains the same or less information and takes longer to watch than the article does to read. I like the 1996 version better.
- emodendroket 9y agoAs far as I can ascertain, that isn't typical behavior and video gets more engagement.
- zeveb 9y ago> video gets more engagement. I keep reading this, so I assume it must be true, but I wonder what that says about our society. There must be huge numbers of illiterates out their pointing and grunting (like something in Idioctracy) to outweigh all the folks I know, who don't watch videos and don't understand why people would.
- emodendroket 9y agoIt doesn't exactly flatter our education system to look into this stuff: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_3880355.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/06/illiteracy-rate_n_... > According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.
- 9y ago
- astura 9y agoThe image map on the very bottom doesn't appear to work, at least not on Chrome for Android. CNN appears to never take anything down, here's CNN's coverage of the OJ Simpson trial from 1999 - http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/ http://www.cnn.com/US/OJ/
- richard_todd 9y agoA lot of the linked stories 404 and many image assets are missing. It’s still cool to see the old web designs, though.
- campuscodi 9y agoWaiting for someone to say "fake news" about any of the stories he doesn't like...
- r721 9y ago>Stay up to date with the text-only version of our website https://lite.cnn.io https://lite.cnn.io https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600 https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/906655818950553600 (10 Sep 2017) HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15210022
- magerleagues 9y agoFrames!
- akerro 9y ago> Then in April 1995, right after the devastating bombing at a federal building in Oklahoma City, the Unabomber attacked again, perhaps peeved that another bomber was making headlines. A package bomb killed a timber industry lobbyist in Sacramento. Days later, Unabomber threatened to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles; and then he promised to stop the bombings if The New York Times and Washington Post published his 35,000-word, anti-technology, anti-modern-civilization diatribe. This guy must be really disappointed to see what the world has became. http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/unabomb/unabomb.index.html http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/topten/una...
- Santosh83 9y agoYup. IIRC he continues to write from prison... EDIT: removed hasty personal judgement.
- akerro 9y ago>IIRC he continues to write from prison, Someone suggest him to open wordpress acc.. aahhh
- colejohnson66 9y agoCouldn’t a relative or someone make an account and post his letters?
- ghostcluster 9y ago
- ghostcluster 9y agoPlane crash second biggest story of the year — CNN hasn't changed.
- pvg 9y agoThis 'Year in review' page doesn't look much like the actual CNN news pages looked: http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150102183958-01-cnn-homepage-1995-super-169.jpg http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150102183958-01-cnn-ho... This is from http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/02/world/gallery/cnn-homepage-through-the-years/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/02/world/gallery/cnn-homepage-thr... which gives a better idea of how the front page evolved over time.
- everdev 9y agoFunny that TV graphics or magazine design in '94 weren't bad, but web design graphics were terrible. It seems like the web could have been beautiful back then, especially with flat design and whitespace techniques.
- yoz-y 9y agoThing is that back then text did not really look that good on screens. The screen resolution was terrible, advanced hinting and anti aliasing techniques were cpu expensive and so on. Textures helped to hide that a bit. Also, flat design works better when people already know that stuff can be clicked, or dragged and such. We can afford to lose some affordance now.
- stinky613 9y ago> Also, flat design works better when people already know that stuff can be clicked, or dragged and such. We can afford to lose some affordance now. That's an excellent observation. IIRC, back in 1996 there were still radio ads along the lines of "And available online at w-w-w-dot-c-n-n-dot-com or AOL keyword CNN" (or, worse yet, some that added h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-w-w-w-dot...). I'll try to avoid stewing on the fact the CEO where I work is very hands-on with our website, despite never using the web. It's 2017 and he has every button replaced with beveled images of buttons... EDIT: to reconcile "very hands-on with our website" and "never uses the web", I should specify that he orders changes to the website via the following process: 1) has someone print out the website 2) that gets faxed to him 3) he writes on it with a sharpie 4) that gets faxed back 5) that fax gets scanned 6) resulting scan gets emailed to the web design guy.
- sandworm101 9y agoLol. As a kid I was living near Kobar towers (Dhahran). It rattled my windows.
- bousaid 9y agoWow same. My dad thought my brother and I were slamming doors. Crazy to see a story about Dhahran.
- sandworm101 9y agoDid you go to the Aramco school at dhahran? We might have met.
- bousaid 9y agoYeah. Born and raised in Dhahran. Finishing up college now! Dad was in exploration.
- chrisco255 9y agoWell news seems to have been a lot tamer in 1996. What a monstrosity it has has become.
- shill 9y ago> It's a question journalists like to ask themselves at the end of ever year. This sentence has had a typo for 21 years.
- mproud 9y agoI clicked on “Games” at the bottom of the page and all I got was [this lousy webmap file](http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/serverside.map?520,41 http://edition.cnn.com/EVENTS/1996/year.in.review/serverside...).